Saturday, February 26, 2011

Donnie Marbut Post Game Interview

Going to leave the intro short here, the questions on this were asked by my fellow Evergreen baseball writer, Adam Lewis. Transcript after the jump!

What do you learn from a day like today? Playing in these kind of conditions.
"I think you learn about the make-up of your team. That's the one thing I didn't question, I didn't question our toughness, I think we have some pretty tough kids. It's not easy for either team, obviously it's really cold for both teams, but you just have to go out and play. Just try and play the games, usually it's 18 innings but we decided to go a nine and a seven. So I think you just get a pretty good idea about the characters of your players and your team.

Can you talk a little bit today about Jason Monda's performance and how confident do you feel plugging him in [as a starter]?
"He's really talented. I've done a really poor job in my career of anointing kids and putting too much pressure on them, so I'm going to try and not do that with Jason. But he's just really talented, he has a lot of tools and he's a smart kid and he's a hard worker and a great teammate. So you just think that with all those things he has going for himself, that he's going to end up being a good player. Still early, but there's very many things that he can do on a baseball field, and he's got the ability to showcase many of them."

Offensively, were you happy with your guys approach?
"Yeah I thought so. I thought we did a really good job with two strikes early, especially in the first game. In the second game, the guy threw a lot of pitches and we didn't get that big hit, but sometimes you don't have to get the big hit to knock him out. I think he probably had 80+ pitches in a hurry so..." He threw a lot of junk too. "Yeah, he did. The thing was to get to the bullpen, because you know, guys are only going to throw X amount of pitches on the weekend. Offensively it was fine, it wasn't great, but it was good."

And then, talk a little bit about Wise and Conley's performance.
"Both awesome. They pitched like the juniors and seniors they are. They commanded the strike zone. That's the one thing too, especially with James in the second game, it's happened twice now, he's given up three runs in one inning and put up zeroes the rest of the way. He just really, James knows how to just buckle down. And then Conley he's just, same as James, they both know how to really compete. You just expect good performances out of them."